That’s the big problem with blogs, of course: who cares what X thinks? It all depends on the quality of the thought, the uniqueness of the product, the value added. In the blogworld, a celebrity name adds no value whatsoever. If the blog’s good, the celebrity may earn some blogcred (oh, Lord, shoot me now for that one) for not sounding like someone who just emerged from the isolation tank of LA culture. But I really don’t care what Larry David thinks about John Bolton. I care what Larry David thinks about the itchy tags on shirts that scrape your neck, because I know that he can make a 12-part TV series that revolves around that detail, and George Will can’t.
We’ll see. In a way blogs are the refutation of the old joke: “The food’s so bad here.” “Yes, and such small portions.” Dole out crap in large amounts all day and you don’t guarantee traffic; eventually people will tired of poking through the heap with a stick looking for diamonds.
Somewhere in there, there’s a metaphor.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-05-10.
October 26, 2021
QotD: Blogging
October 24, 2021
Andrew Sullivan – “They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying ‘Could it be Satan?!’ when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say ‘Could it be whiteness?!'”
Andrew Sullivan on what he titles “The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance”:
It was, as it turned out, a bit of a non-event. The walkout by transgender Netflix employees and their supporters to demand that the company take down and apologize for the latest Chappelle special attracted “dozens”, despite media hype.
But the scenes were nonetheless revealing. A self-promoting jokester showed up with a placard with the words “We Like Jokes” and “We Like Dave” to represent an opposing view. He was swiftly accosted by a man who ripped the poster apart, leaving the dude with just a stick, prompting the assailant to shout “He’s got a weapon!” Pushed back by other protestors, he was then confronted by a woman right in front of him — shaking a tambourine — and yelling repeatedly into his face: “Repent, motherfucker! Repent! Repent!”
This is the state of what’s left of the gay rights movement in America. Judgmental, absolutist, intolerant, and hysterical, it looks to shut down speech it dislikes, drive its foes out of the public square, compile enemies’ lists of dangerous writers, artists, and politicians, and cancel and protest anything that does not comport with every tiny aspect of their increasingly deranged ideology.
The generation that now leads the movement does not seem to know the actual history of the gay rights movement, or the centrality of free expression to gay identity. They also seem to have no idea of the history of the movement against gay rights. Because if they did, they might be shocked at the ironies involved.
Anti-gay forces, hegemonic for centuries, were just like these trans activists. They were just as intent on suppressing and stigmatizing magazines, shows, and movies they believed were harmful. They too targeted individual artists and writers for personal destruction. They too believed that movies and comedy needed to be reined in order to prevent social harm. They protested in front of movie theaters. They tried to get shows canceled. And if you’d marched in any gay demo or Pride in the 1990s, you’d always be prepared to confront a grimacing Christianist yelling “Repent! Repent!” in your face.
In fact, it’s hard not to see the trans far left as a farcical replay of the Religious Right of the past. They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying “Could it be Satan?!” when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say “Could it be whiteness?!”
This was never, ever the spirit of the gay rights movement in the past. In fact, it was America’s guarantee of free expression and free association that made the gay rights movement possible. It was the First Amendment, and the spirit of the First Amendment, that was easily the most important right for gays for decades. From the fledgling Society for Human Rights, formed in Chicago in 1924, and its pioneering magazine, Friendship and Freedom, to the struggles against censorship in the 1950s, with One Magazine, and erotic Physique pamphlets under siege, it was the First Amendment that, especially under Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed gay people to find each other, to develop arguments for their own dignity and self-worth, and to sustain free associations when the entire society viewed them as perverts and undesirables and child molesters.
October 21, 2021
QotD: Bill Belichick
Again, this is emergent behavior. If Brady is carving his defense up, the defensive coordinator is under immense pressure to do something, anything, to change the dynamic. He knows that every yahoo in the tv audience is yelling “blitz him!!”, so that’s what the coordinator does, even though he knows full well that a) that’s stupid and counterproductive, and b) so are the yahoos urging him to do it, because if they knew anything worth knowing, they’d be wearing a headset instead of jockeying a barstool. Same goes for the yahoos at ESPN, from the bimbette who’s going to shove a mic in his face at the postgame press conference to the hair-gelled dipshits on the shout shows. “Why didn’t you blitz him?” is going to be the first thing out of their mouths, so again, even though he knows it, and they, are stupid, the coordinator dials up a few blitzes … with predictable results.
Football is a great metaphor for politics, especially in the sense that it’s the supposed experts, the guys who get paid millions of dollars to be innovative and analytical, who are the most allergic to actual analysis and innovation. I guess Tom Brady doesn’t play for the Patriots anymore, but for the sake of rhetorical continuity let’s assume he does, and look at legendary coach Bill Belichick. Much smarter, more knowledgeable folks than me have pointed out that he’s really not all that innovative, in the sense of “coming up with wacky new schemes.” Nor is he a particularly shrewd judge of football talent — for every Tom Brady who falls into his lap (Brady was famously a 6th round pick that Belichick had nothing to do with), or Randy Moss that he seems to rehabilitate for a few seasons, there are other big name free agents who join the Patriots and flame out, or highly touted draft picks that don’t do anything. The two secrets of Belichick’s success seem to be: 1) he actually knows the rules, and 2) he fits his game plans to the game.
#1 seems weird, I know, but here’s an example: A decade or so back, he was facing a rival, Pittsburgh or someone, who had a ferocious defense. Belichick knew that the said ferocious defense would be geared up to stopping TE Rob Gronkowski, who had burned them for a million yards last time. To defeat this, Belichick made sacrifice to his strange and awful gods, meditated in a secret Himalayan ashram with the Black Lotus society, and … checked the weather report, which told him that it would almost certainly be cold and rainy on game night. So then he broke out the rule book, in which he learned that there’s no rule against putting out as many offensive lineman as you want — it’s called a “goal line formation” — and so he simply swapped out Gronkowski for a sixth lineman, and ran the ball all night.
Which feeds into #2. Weather reports aren’t top secret information, and the rule book is literally right there, but everyone watching the game — most especially including the Steelers’ defensive coordinator — acted like Belichick had pulled his game plan straight out of the Necronomicon. They had no idea what he was doing, or any clue how to stop it. Here again, it’s not as if the Steelers’ d-coordinator had never seen a goal line formation before, or the announcers had never witnessed a game being played in the rain. It’s just that … well, he’s Rob Gronkowski. They pay him millions to catch balls and wreck worlds, and he was barely on the field. No other coach would do what Belichick did, because who else would tell a zillionaire glory boy to ride the pine, and expect to be obeyed?
See what I mean? Belichick’s “system” was that he didn’t have a system. He figured out what was most likely to win the game, then did that. Note too that nobody seemed to be baffled that an even richer, even more important glory boy, Tom Brady, was also pretty much useless that night. And again, who but Bill would have the sheer brass balls to tell a surefire Hall of Famer to just hand the ball off over and over and over and over and over …? There’s no question that if it should ever happen that Bill believed he had a better chance of winning a given game without Brady than with him, Brady’s ass would’ve been benched for that game, future Hall of Famer or not.
That’s what I mean about emergent behavior. Both Belichick and the Steelers’ d-coordinator thought they were trying to win the game. Hell, I’m willing to believe that both of them would swear in the very throne room of God Almighty that they did everything they could think of to win. It’s just that Belichick could think of a lot more “anything” than the other guy could, because the other guy felt he had to worry about the dudes on barstools, and the sideline reporterettes, and the jock sniffers on the ESPN rant shows, and Belichick … didn’t. That’s all.
Severian, “Are They Trying to Lose?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-15.
October 20, 2021
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition – Music of World War Two – WW2 – On the Homefront 011
World War Two
Published 19 Oct 2021With the ascent of the radio, popular music became an important cultural phenomenon for the masses throughout the world. Therefore, it is the perfect mouthpiece for Allied war propaganda during the Second World War.
(more…)
October 19, 2021
The Wertham effect “… produces evidence-free moral panics and demands for government crackdowns”
In City Journal, John Tierney evaluates the evidence for the claims of psychological damage inflicted on young women through social media (specifically Instagram):
Contrary to what you’ve heard from the press and Congress, the internal documents leaked by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen do not prove that that the company’s Instagram platform is psychologically scarring teenagers. But the current furor does clearly demonstrate another psychological phenomenon: the Fredric Wertham effect, named for a New York psychiatrist who, like Haugen, starred at a nationally televised Senate hearing about a toxic new media menace to America’s youth.
Wertham testified in 1954 about his book, Seduction of the Innocent, which he described as the result of “painstaking, laborious clinical study.” After reciting his scientific credentials, Wertham declared: “It is my opinion, without any reasonable doubt and without any reservation, that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency.”
The hearing made the front page of the New York Times, one of many publications (including The New Yorker) to give Wertham’s book a glowing review. Others featured his warnings under headlines like “Depravity for Children” and “Horror in the Nursery”. During the great comic book scare, as the historian David Hajdu calls it, churches and the American Legion organized events across the country where schoolchildren tossed comics into bonfires. Wertham’s recommendation “to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores” inspired dozens of state and municipal laws banning or regulating comic books, and many people in the industry lost their jobs.
There was never any good evidence that comic books hurt children. Wertham’s work was a jumble of anecdotes about troubled youths and unsupported conjectures about comic books inspiring violent crimes. He fretted, as today’s Instagram critics do, that the unrealistic images of curvaceous bodies were psychologically damaging girls and claimed that superheroes were promoting everything from homosexuality (Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman) to fascism (Superman). Contemporaries like the sociologist Frederic Thrasher lambasted Wertham’s work as “prejudiced and worthless”, and it was later exposed as fraudulent.
As we’ve learned repeatedly, scientific rigor doesn’t matter to journalists and politicians eager to blame children’s problems on any new trend in media or entertainment, whether it’s television, rock and roll, Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal music, cell phones, rap lyrics, or video games. That’s the Fredric Wertham effect, which produces evidence-free moral panics and demands for government crackdowns.
The villain du jour is Facebook, which is being compared with Big Tobacco because its own confidential research supposedly proves how dangerous its product is. The research was revealed in a Wall Street Journal article, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Many Teen Girls, Company Documents Show,” which cited a survey finding that 32 percent of teenage girls who were experiencing body-image issues said that Instagram made them feel worse about their problem. But most of the girls surveyed said that Instagram either had no effect (46 percent) or made them feel better (22 percent). And the issue of body image was the subject of just one of the survey’s 12 questions. On the other 11 (covering problems like loneliness, anxiety, sadness, and social comparison), the girls who said Instagram made them feel better outnumbered those who said it made them feel worse. The teenage boys in the survey skewed heavily positive on all the questions.
October 18, 2021
QotD: Harold Macmillan’s “Gold Pass” on British Railways
Too old? Just a few years later that same wily showman drove a memorable stiletto into Margaret Thatcher’s ribs, using the same falsely quavering voice to attack her policy of selling off national assets. But I remember the humiliating occasion of my failed interview for another reason. Macmillan was able to drive me away partly because he was occupying an entire first-class compartment, reserved for him personally, on the London express. Compartments — oh, how I miss them — had sliding doors, which cut them off from the rest of the train. You could even pull the blinds down between you and the corridor. They could be marvelous private spaces for all kinds of purposes on long journeys. But you had to be lucky to get one to yourself. Once the ex-premier had driven me out, he was safe.
But Macmillan (who in those days had not given into vanity and accepted a peerage) did not have to be lucky. He had once been a director of the Great Western Railway, which had been taken into state ownership in the 1940s. So to the end of his life (in compensation for his lost power) he possessed a magical shiny token called a Gold Pass. This entitled him to free first-class travel, without limit, on any train in Great Britain. It was even rumored that it gave him the power to have trains stopped for him at stations where they did not normally halt. I often thought I would rather have such a pass than be prime minister.
Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.
October 17, 2021
Just about the least likely 2021 issue … protesting a school principal for her musical taste
In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh reports on some St. Catharines, Ontario parents who apparently just woke up from a 40-year long stasis pod:
Adrian Humphreys has a short item in today’s Post about an attempt to petition against a St. Catharines, Ont., public school principal because of her off-hours fondness for Britain’s ancient heavy-metal act Iron Maiden. NP Platformed can only applaud the success of what is clearly a disguised ploy for global publicity: Maiden, now 46 years into a busy life of recording and touring, released its first new studio LP in six years last month.
Then again, it is vaguely possible that the petition was started out of genuine concern by the “parents”, who claimed to have authored it, none of whom have stepped forward to own their objections to principal Sharon Burns. (She is, perhaps wisely, not giving interviews herself.)
If you’re about Burns’s age, you can only marvel at the operations of Father Time. When we and Burns and Iron Maiden’s (mostly intact) classic lineup were all still young, the band was one whose symbols you might draw on a Duo-Tang to annoy and disquiet a prissy teacher. How the tables have turned, as tables will.
Burns’s Instagram account contained photos of her going to concerts and wearing Iron Maiden merchandise of the sort that has made the group incalculable fortunes. Her gear included some references to 1982’s The Number of the Beast, which critical consensus considers to still be the finest of the group’s studio albums.
This was seen by the anonymous petitioners as signalling an allegiance to Satanism, and perhaps it’s natural for a very sheltered parent to have become upset. (The school, as Humphreys explains, has a distant background as a Mennonite Bible school.) But getting angry at Iron Maiden in 2021 feels a little like getting angry at McDonald’s. Even on a surface level, Maiden, a “new wave” metal group that did its most innovative work in the 1970s and ’80s, has been succeeded by several generations of metal groups and entire subcultures that take the violence, noise, crudity and obscenity into realms we old farts never dreamt of.
October 15, 2021
“… a preliminary Conservative estimate is that the PPC rise cost them between four and nine seats”
Matt Gurney looks at the federal Conservatives’ efforts in the September election and tries to assess how much the rise of the People’s Party of Canada impacted Conservative fortunes:
O’Toole planned to shift the CPC slightly toward the moderate centre on the assumption that the party’s traditionally lopsided wins in western Canada meant that it could lose a little on the right to flip some close seats in the east. This didn’t work. The Tories did shed support on the right, which might explain some measure of the PPC’s rise, but the CPC didn’t make up enough ground in eastern ridings to flip seats.
However, the election-night results are somewhat deceiving. O’Toole’s strategy was more effective than the final outcome suggests. In Ontario, in particular, the Conservatives materially cut into the Liberals’ advantage in the popular vote, effectively halving it, relative to 2019. This meant that the Liberals were extremely reliant on vote efficiency: a one-per cent swing of voters from the LPC to the CPC could have flipped dozens of seats, setting up a scenario where O’Toole could have been prime minister today. (These flips would not have come from the Greater Toronto Area, interestingly, where the Liberals continue to run up some lopsided victories of their own, but from other parts of Ontario and random seats all across the country. The election was closer than people realize.)
But back to the PPC. Did giving them room to grow on the right end up costing the CPC seats? If so, while that wouldn’t necessarily discredit the notion of moving the CPC toward the centre, it absolutely complicates it. If the Conservatives can’t take their right flank for granted, their lives get a lot more difficult. In a recent feature in the Toronto Star, Althia Raj, who apparently spoke to every insider on the planet, wrote that a preliminary Conservative estimate is that the PPC rise cost them between four and nine seats.
That sounds about right, and it doesn’t sound like much. Indeed, if anything, there’s reason to believe that that is overly generous to the PPC.
[…]
In aggregate terms, the author found that while you could conclude that a handful of ridings were possibly but not certainly lost due to a PPC surge, you couldn’t definitively conclude that any were lost because the Conservatives gave up ground on the right. This gets us to the low-end figure cited by Raj, but looking at this report, I don’t know where the rest could possibly have come from.
Every additional seat would have been good news for O’Toole. And the rise in the PPC vote share is worth studying on its own merits — The Line continues to work with John Wright to firm up our understanding of the PPC, both as a political and social movement.
But as an electoral force that hurt O’Toole in the last election, while we can certainly say it didn’t help, it also didn’t seem to hurt much.
Having met dozens of eager PPC supporters over the last two election campaigns, I have to believe that at most one third of them are former Tory voters … a lot of the people I met were not habitual voters for any party before the PPC came along. At one meeting I attended in 2019, there were more former Libertarian voters than Conservative voters around the table, but neither group was a majority. A lot of them were fans of Maxime Bernier personally — and note that this meeting was literally in the heart of Erin O’Toole’s own riding, a couple of blocks away from his constituency office.
October 14, 2021
The quasi-monopolies of the “web giants”
Arthur Chrenkoff runs afoul of automated “community standards” enforcement on social media, getting locked out of his Twitter account for something that any actual human being would be able to instantly decide was not at all any kind of violation of normal human interactions online or in-person. Of course, if you’ve been in this position yourself, you won’t be surprised to find that launching an appeal of the bot’s action does not get immediate response … and sometimes never gets any attention from a human. He’s aware of this, and he’s still of the belief that this does not call out for any kind of government intervention:
“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0
I remain broadly sympathetic to the free market argument that competition will, in time, cure any problems that business activity throws up from time to time, such as market domination or underhand practices. The mighty will be brought down low, new players will offer new products, consumer preferences will change, creative (or destructive) equilibrium will be restored. We can all argue, of course, to what extent free market and free competition exist in any particular setting at any particular time. If “real socialism” has never been tried, “real free market” (as opposed to capitalism, which is not necessarily the same thing) might be equally rare in practice. It is certainly true that comparing the lists of top 50 biggest companies one hundred, 50, 20 years ago and today will indicate a lot of economic change, but might not tell us very much about the reasons for that change, which can be quite complex.
The tech giants might not be historically unique as far as their size and power are concerned, but they’re not the norm either. They are not exactly monopolists, but their domination of their particular sections of the market elevates them from the domain of mere companies to something akin to public utilities. Google, Facebook and YouTube, for example, account for 80 per cent of digital advertising in Australia. There are alternatives to all these providers but they are so tiny by comparison as to defeat their main purpose for many users, which is to provide the biggest possible reach and exposure to the world. If you get demonetised or banned by YouTube, other video-sharing platforms can give you only a fraction of the traffic and the eyeballs, which impoverishes you literally and the internet users metaphorically, since they are now less likely to be exposed to the broad range of content. There are other social networks, but only Facebook has “everyone” on it, including your grandma, school friend from primary, and that couple you’ve met on the trip to Spain. Sure, if you get banned from Facebook, you can still try to keep in touch with all these people via many separate channels but it’s so much more difficult, disjointed and time consuming. For that same reason, Facebook’s Marketplace has a much better reach than other platforms that are focused exclusively on online ads. If Marketplace continues to shadow ban me, I can try Craigslist or Gumtree or Locanto, but – certainly in the categories I’m interested in – they all have significantly smaller audiences.
The traditional response to bad customer experience has been “try somebody/something else”. You don’t like Facebook – or Facebook doesn’t like you? Try another similar service. But I’m not sure if most of my friends would be able to name even one alternative to FB, and the chances they are on it are even slimmer. So telling people to stop whining and use an alternative to the tech giants is akin to telling someone “Oh, you can’t have a mobile (cell) phone? So what, no one is stopping you from writing a letter!” It’s the same but different. This is the consequence of the domination of the internet by the Googles and the Facebooks. And the internet now does play an essential role – for better or worse – in our lives and work. Hence the comparison to public utilities. Facebook might not be quite like electricity or running water, but it’s very close to, say, phone service. Yes, you can opt for another social network, but compared to Facebook this would be like a phone company that only makes it possible for you to contact one in twenty people instead of just about everyone, and even then maybe only once a week, at a time predetermined by the provider. It’s a service of sorts, but so inferior in every way to the main game in town as to be incomparable.
I’m not offering any solution to this problem. Many, both on the left and the right, are increasingly of a mind that, like Standard Oil of more than a century ago, the tech behemoths of today need to be broken down into smaller and less powerful units. That could solve some problems but won’t solve many others. Like mine, for example; a somehow “smaller” Twitter and Facebook can still be unresponsive and unaccountable. And as we know from other areas of economy, greater involvement and control by the supposedly impartial government does not guarantee better outcomes either. Big government, like big business, is run by human beings who, quite apart from their own characteristics as individuals, work within a particular culture, which has its own values, agendas and preferences. Government is a monopolist too in many ways, and for all the politics, is not necessarily responsive and accountable either.
October 11, 2021
The Line responds to charges that their reporting on China is “anti-Asian racism”
As an impoverished cheapskate, I can’t afford to subscribe to The Line‘s full service, but they do allow a sub-set of their work to appear to non-paying subscribers, like this response to a former subscriber who accused them of “anti-Asian racism” in their posts involving the People’s Republic of China:
China’s emergence as a global power is going to be one of the defining stories of the first half of the 21st century. We probably aren’t reading and writing about it enough. Late this week, however, we received a note from a now-former reader, who said that the pieces we had run, and the overall focus on China, reflected anti-Asian racism, and they would not be supporting us going forward.
Look, it’s your money, folks. We want more and more of you to subscribe all the time. But we certainly respect your right to decline, or to unsubscribe if you don’t like the offerings. However, we do have a word of reply to those who would suggest that publishing articles about China is racist: get bent.
There is indeed anti-Asian racism out there. We have seen a lot of disturbing signs of it during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Asians of any description have been subjected to harassment and even random acts of violence. In the United States, some of the more fiery anti-Chinese rhetoric favoured by the former president also undoubtedly contributed to that wave, and that has spilled over here. Further, the problem of anti-Asian racism of course isn’t new. We have a long history of anti-Asian discrimination in North America. This must be acknowledged. Anti-Asian hate was real before Trump and COVID, and it’ll remain long after both are finished.
But writing critically about the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese armed forces, the policies of the Chinese government, the actions of the Chinese government, and the increasingly overt meddling in the affairs of other nations by Chinese intelligence operations, does not reflect any discredit upon Asian-Canadians, or any Asian in general. The policies of the Chinese government are exactly that: policies of a government. Criticizing policies and governments is not just acceptable, it’s absolutely necessary.
Indeed, we noted with grim amusement during a recent conversation with a colleague, who is comfortably nestled within the left-leaning progressive side of Canada’s political spectrum, that progressives in particular ought to be 100 per cent comfortable criticizing Chinese government policy. After all, progressives have been loudly and correctly noting for generations that there is a difference between rank antisemitism and warranted criticism of Israeli government policy. We find it fascinating that some of the very same people who would be horrified to be accused of antisemitism for criticizing Israel get tongue-tied when the Chinese government starts throwing religious minority women into rape camps.
We suspect some of it is simply rooted in the rampant identitarian obsessions of Western political discourse. People who criticize white supremacist Western imperialism a dozen times before breakfast might find it intellectually discombobulating to acknowledge that Western liberal democracies are not the only big baddies on the global stage. We’ve witnessed the many mental gymnastics that have been deployed to minimize or wish away credible reports of genocide and concentration camps, as if they were merely a Western fantasy being used to concoct a pretext for war. This is an ahistoric argument, by the way. The West has not been angling for war with one of its most lucrative suppliers and customers, quite the opposite. Until recently, we’ve operated under a Fukuyama delusion: the ironclad belief that China would moderate and liberalize as it grew more prosperous. This was predicated on the arrogant assumption that the liberal democratic West was the end state of history and that China would eventually meet us here, thus allowing peace and profit for all. That optimism hasn’t panned out, and many Western countries — Canada among them — have spent the last few years trying to reconcile our economic interdependence with our collective “oh shit” epiphany.
October 10, 2021
QotD: The taste for ugliness
The word ugly does not quite capture the connotations of the word “moche“, which include those of bad taste. If I were to try to make a table, it would probably be ugly due to my incapacity as a woodworker, but not moche.
I must say that the publishers of the book (Fayard) have done the author proud. The shiny cover of the book is vivid purple at the top, descending by various shades of unpleasant colours to a bilious yellow at the bottom. The typeface is also in purple, and the pages the same shade of yellow where they are bound into the spine. It is, as an artifact, aesthetically appalling, as obviously it was meant to be.
If we lived in a normal world, the deliberate creation of something ugly would be regarded as reprehensible: but we do not live in such a world.
The author is an apologist for the ugly, seeing the search for beauty as a kind of totalitarian dictatorship against which the ugly is a justified or necessary revolt or uprising, a cry for individual freedom.
She is a Parisian bourgeoise who has been taught to decry and therefore to reject her own previous privilege. In her own estimate, she was unfortunate to have been so fortunate as to have been surrounded by beauty.
This highly ideological, dog-in-the-manger attitude to beauty is commonplace and has almost been made the basis of official policy — or if it has not, it might just as well have been.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Kitsch and Our Taste for the Ugly”, The Iconoclast, 2021-06-18.
October 9, 2021
You need to ask yourself “Am I the crazy one?” (and hope you don’t hear yourself answering…)
In The Line, Jen Gerson considers the widely predicted epidemic of mental health issues the experts thought would follow the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic as it faded:
That warning doesn’t seem to have panned out, exactly. As this more recent op-ed in the Atlantic pointed out, rates of depression and anxiety spiked at the beginning of the pandemic, but then receded. Rates of life satisfaction are near pre-pandemic norms. And the suicide rate has actually declined for reasons no one can quite pin.
“The pandemic has been a test of the global psychological immune system, which appears more robust than we would have guessed. When familiar sources of enjoyment evaporated in the spring of 2020, people got creative. They participated in drive-by birthday parties, mutual-assistance groups, virtual cocktail evenings with old friends, and nightly cheers for health-care workers. Some people got really good at baking,” the authors wrote, optimistically.
I think they’re wrong. Or, rather, I think we proved to be resilient in all the ways that the authors were looking at, and far more fragile in the ways they weren’t.
I think we’re in the middle of the mental-health pandemic right now; I think we’re in it so deep that we can’t even see it anymore. And I think we can’t see it because the crisis is not taking the form we expected it to take.
We expected the post-pandemic mental-health crisis to look the way they used to look — invisible. The depressed sister who hasn’t called for months. The anxiety-ridden best friend who drowns her tics in pills and alcohol. For the majority of the population that doesn’t suffer from a diagnosable mental-health issue, mental-health crises are often hidden. We expected a traumatic post-pandemic mental-health crisis to look a lot like this — another person’s problem — but on a grander scale.
This assumption leaves our entire framework with a missing link. A mental-health pandemic isn’t necessarily going to show up on a self-reported survey about anxiety and depression levels.
It’s going to show up in behaviour — and often behaviour that can be rationalized.
Because crazy people don’t think they’re crazy. You can’t see it when you’re in it.
Look around; are people acting normal lately? Think of the protests we saw during the election, or the anti-vaccine marches through our downtown cores. Think of the mom wearing two masks who screamed because your kid got too close on the playground — was that rational, grounded, sane behaviour?
Something is happening to a lot of people, and you see it in both the COVID deniers and also those who have made a religion out of the dangers of the disease. There are people out there that still can’t collect the mail without taking “precautions”. How about the people who are still sanitizing their groceries? That might have been reasonable in the Spring of 2020, when we weren’t sure how COVID spread. Now it looks a lot more like OCD.
Have you not noticed that some of the most brilliant people, after spending months devoid of much human contact, are now acting like raving loons on outlets like Twitter? Increased dependency on a gamified and polarizing social media for socialization during periods of extended isolation seems to have broken the ability to think clearly or behave civilly. This is hard to quantify, but I can’t be the only one to feel as if social media has grown palpably worse over the last year.
October 7, 2021
Alberta’s pantomime election to nominate a Senate candidate that Trudeau can ignore with great relish
In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh discusses the apparently ongoing non-binding election for Alberta’s next Senate seat:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S. Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
The prestige of Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments must be maintained at all hazards, which is why the Prime Minister’s Office undertook, a little surprisingly, to provide our Ryan Tumilty with an official response to Alberta’s Senate election. The board, says the voice of the PMO, “evaluates candidates based on public, merit-based criteria”; it was not deemed necessary to finish the sentence with “… unlike the demented, bloodthirsty populace of Alberta, who will presumably just vote for the candidate who can devour the most tar sand at a COVID party.”
For our part, NP Platformed has always been a tad frustrated that smaller political groupings don’t welcome Alberta Senate elections as a chance for a low-stakes, low-cost electoral push toward the limelight. Now that federal and provincial Conservative parties are united, for the moment, 2021’s Senate election has not been accompanied even by the quiet campaigning or the minuscule media attention that the first four elections involved. It is probably to be expected that the three Conservative Party of Canada candidates on the Senate ballot will accumulate enough semi-automatic votes to be nominated.
The Liberals and New Democrats, on an official level, stayed further away from the Senate election process than ever. Duncan Kinney, a totally-independent-from-the-NDP left-wing journalist and fellow of the Broadbent Institute, is appearing on the ballot as part of a sort of none-of-the-above campaign. His entire platform is “this Senate election is illegitimate and stupid, but wouldn’t it be amusing if I won anyhow?” (We’ll take the bait: yes, it would!)
And the People’s party has taken the opportunity to pick three official nominees. If you ask us, the Mad Max party absolutely ought to have hung onto some of what it spent on the federal election and devoted the funds to making a big splash in this one. The TV networks and newspapers would ululate with helpful rage if some PPC creature topped the Senate ballot. Heck, Maxime Bernier has always been able to personally attract big crowds in Alberta. If he had planned ahead and squatted here for six months to meet the residency requirement, he could have run in the Senate election himself.
His proxies probably won’t get anywhere, but we’ll see. There really is an opportunity for a bit of chaos here, since anyone who can break into the top three on this ballot would become an Alberta “senator-in-waiting”. Some of the independent candidates, including former Slave Lake mayor Karina Pillay and former Alberta finance minister Doug Horner, have name recognition that could count for a lot in a low-turnout vote.
QotD: Music as a career choice
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-06-03.
October 6, 2021
Jonathan Kay explains why Justin Trudeau’s no-show got a lot of Canadians mad
Linked from Small Dead Animals, Jonathan Kay took to the twits to summarize why this particular Justin Trudeau flake-out seems to have impacted his reputation so much more than all the other flake-outs he’s pulled over the years (screencapped for those who find Threadreader links objectionable):
